Intranet and Internet data centers employ a form of hosting known as dedicated hosting. In dedicated hosting, servers are statically assigned to customers/applications (henceforth referred to as customers only). The number of servers assigned to each customers is determined based on the peak load that each customer may receive. Since the peak load is significantly higher than the average load, this results in lower than average utilization of the servers. It is desirable to design a hosting method that can improve the server utilization levels.
To improve server utilization levels, dedicated hosting solutions have been modified to dynamically assign servers to each customer. In such solutions, a traffic measuring entity determines the offered load for each customer. Based on the offered load, it determines the number of servers needed for each customer. Then the number of servers assigned to each customer is either increased or decreased. Though this solution improves upon the efficiency achieved by static assignment, it still is not as efficient as an ideal scheme. In fact, due to the time it takes to reassign servers, such a scheme may use more resources than an idealized scheme.